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Interview with Laura Mulvey Gender, Gaze and Technology in Film Culture

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Interview with Laura Mulvey Gender, Gaze and Technology in Film Culture See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258192310 Interview With Laura Mulvey: Gender, Gaze and Technology in Film Culture Article in Theory Culture & Society · September 2011 DOI: 10.1177/0263276411398278 CITATIONS READS 32 8,223 1 author: Roberta Sassatelli University of Milan 62 PUBLICATIONS 1,704 CITATIONS SEE PROFILE Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects: Sharing economy, Home making and Hospitality. AirBnb among the Middle-Classes in Milan View project Food Consumption, Hospitality and Gender Among Italian Middle Classed View project All content following this page was uploaded by Roberta Sassatelli on 26 January 2016. The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file. Interview with Laura Mulvey Gender, Gaze and Technology in Film Culture Roberta Sassatelli Abstract This conversation between Laura Mulvey and Roberta Sassatelli offers a his- torical reconstruction of Mulvey’s work, from her famous essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ to her most recent reflections on male gaze, film technology and visual culture. The conversation initially deals with the socio-cultural context in which the ‘Visual Pleasure ...’ essay was produced by outlining a number of possible theoretical parallelisms with other scholars, from Foucault to Barthes to Goffman. Then, on the basis of Mulvey’s latest book, Death 24Â a Second, and of a variety of contemporary examples, the emphasis is on the relative shift in Mulvey’s work from gender to time and visual technology. Finally, the conversation focuses on the con- cept of ‘gendered scopic regime’ and the potential re-articulation of the male gaze through the technological re-direction and control of the visual. Key words feminist film theory j gendered scopic regime j male gaze j time and visuality j visual technology INEMA IS able ‘to materialize both fantasy and the fantastic’, it is ‘phantasmagoria, illusion and a symptom of the social unconscious’, Cwrites Laura Mulvey (1996: xiv) in the preface to one of her collec- tions of essays. What we watch on the screen could and should be inter- preted as bearing a latent, and partly hidden, meaning, re£ecting the profound concerns of the culture it emerges from, thus eliciting emotions, pleasure and pain. In£uenced by a Lacanian blend of Freudianism, j Theory, Culture & Society 2011 (SAGE, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore), Vol. 28(5):123^143 DOI: 10.1177/0263276411398278 Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com by guest on December 21, 2015 124 Theory, Culture & Society 28(5) Mulvey’s work has decisively contributed to orientate ¢lm studies towards psychoanalysis, opening that intersection with feminist thought that has proved crucial for visual studies at large (see Chaudhuri, 2006; Rose, 2007). In the following interview, which was conducted in Mulvey’s o⁄ce at Birkbeck College in February 2007, she reconstructs her 30-year career as a ¢lm scholar, moving from the concept of the male gaze to her recent re£ec- tions on the development of ¢lm technologies.1 Both interviewee and interviewer were somewhat chased by the great shadow of Mulvey’s seminal essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975),2 whose argument indeed sets the exchange going. Classical Hollywood cinema, we have learnt through Mulvey’s polemic essay, re£ects a patriarchal language: woman is represented as ‘other’, as an object rather than a subject, materializing man’s unconscious. In particular, observing some of Hitchcock’s ¢lms ^ such as Rear Window (1954) and Vertigo (1958) ^ Mulvey showed the workings of the paradox of phallocentrism: the TV camera’s gaze is co-extensive with the male gaze, which depends on the image of ‘the castrated woman’ in order to make sense of the world. The spectator, both male and female, is invited to take pleasure in a partic- ular con¢guration of the gaze through which ‘the male hero acts’ while ‘women are seen and showed at the same time’: ‘their appearance is so much coded for a strong visual and erotic impact that it can be argued that they connote the true essence of being seen’ (Mulvey, 1975: 9). The ensuing ways of seeing ¢x gender identities in an irremediably hierarchical relation. Although Mulvey’s approach has been relevantly criticized ^ for having embraced the heterosexual matrix and not having seriously considered the widely diverse modalities of spectatorship (see Creed, 1993; Gamman and Makinen, 1994; Mirzoeff, 1999) ^ her work remains important. It sits with the works of Berger (1972), Goffman (1976) and Williamson (1978) in a pantheon of studies that, almost simultaneously but very di¡erently, con- tributed to showing the relational character of gender identities, the role played by the active/passive dialectic and its realization through visual forms (see Sassatelli, 2010). Mulvey is indeed acutely aware that the moment of visual representation is crucial in the formation of gender identi- ties, and she insists that the e¡ects of representation remain particularly burdensome for women. While classic Hollywood movies give us back a woman-object through a male gaze that projects his own fantasy on the female ¢gure in two ways ^ voyeuristic (which sees the rebel woman as temptress and prostitute) or fetishist (the docile and redeeming woman rep- resented as the Virgin Mary) ^ Mulvey indicates a possible way out in the exploration of alternative representation strategies informed by feminism and avant-garde cinema. Avant-garde, alternative cinema is central to Mulvey’s intellectual itin- erary. Mainly in the 1970s and 1980s, she had an important role not only as a film theorist but also as an avant-garde film director, writing and directing with her husband Peter Wollen a few widely discussed movies such as Riddles of the Sphinx (1977) (see Mulvey and Wollen, 1976). Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com by guest on December 21, 2015 Sassatelli ^ Interview with Laura Mulvey 125 Mulvey and Wollen’s movie production draws on and develops many of her key theoretical insights. In trying to deconstruct women’s pleasure in look- ing at themselves as objects by proposing alternative viewpoints, in her ¢lms Mulvey has focused attention on, among others, such strong, active and creative female ¢gures as aviator Amy Johnson (Amy, 1980) and pho- tographer Tina Modotti and painter Frida Kahlo (Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti, 1982). When this last work comes to be addressed in the interview, Mulvey dwells upon the issue of female creativity and its role in the repre- sentation of the female body. The interview ends with a dialogue about Mulvey’s most recent works, particularly her collection of essays, Death 24Â a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (Mulvey, 2005). Mulvey opens this collection by high- lighting a shift in focus: from gender to technology. At ¢rst sight, it may appear as a considerable jump. Still, technology shapes our visibility regime as much as the gendered shaping of our ways of seeing. Mulvey con- siders technology ^ exempli¢ed by the shift to the digital ^ as analogous to what she believes to be the male gaze nowadays: ‘[w]hile technology never simply determines, it cannot but a¡ect the context in which ideas are formed’ (Mulvey, 2005: 9).The arrival of the digital has produced a new rela- tionship between representation and reality, which tends to underline the boundaries between what is moving and what is motionless, between life and death, and between death and the mechanical animation of what is inan- imate. The book comprises many essays, including the essay on Psycho (1960), where the author goes back to Hitchcock, focusing on the problem of the representation of the dead body in an implicit dialogue with Freud about the dialectics between Eros and Thanatos, and the essay on Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia (1953), which was broadly discussed in the interview as well. Mulvey closes the book with a re£ection on the status of the spectator: ‘the possessive spectator’, who needs to appropriate the ‘ephemeral experience of kinematics’ almost materially, through its gadgets, the photos of the stars, the posters; and the ‘pensive spectator’, who can now look not at the world through the movie(s), but at the movie(s) as a world of images and codes that can be dismounted and remounted. The interview ends with an opening towards the possibility for the spectator to be helped by technology in overturning dominant visibility regimes, includ- ing the male gaze: invoked is the ¢gure of the alternative spectator, who uses curiosity and desire (Mulvey, 1996) to decode the screen and cultivate a consciously utopian scene, beyond the here and now, from which to gaze into a possible future. Roberta Sassatelli (hereafter RS): We shall go through your works starting from the 1970s ... and of course I must ask you to go back to one which is unanimously considered as seminal, always referred to in film studies and feminist literature, your paper on visual pleasure which appeared in Screen in 1975. Now that essay is crucial because it establishes the notion of the male gaze, and introduces a gendered-located subjectivity in film Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com by guest on December 21, 2015 126 Theory, Culture & Society 28(5) studies. I wonder how this introduction of the subjective angle, a subjective angle which is productive of identity as well as text, is related to the broader development of post-structuralist theory. Laura Mulvey (hereafter LM): To my mind, the essay is pre-post-structural. It emerged out of a very particular moment in which the women’s liberation movement was just beginning to engage with theory ... .Butthebroader intellectual movements that were beginning to emerge during the 1970s, such as post-structuralism, had not really influenced me, apart, of course, from the revival of interest in psychoanalysis.
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